For well over a century, freshwater fish from Europe – the carp (originally from China), have been released, either deliberately or accidentally from fish farms, into Australian waterways. The fish, now widely regarded as pests, are thriving. Their habitat includes rivers flowing through the Murray-Darling Basin of New South Wales. Those vast waterways support, through […]
Author: Larry Powell
I’m a veteran eco-journalist living in Shoal Lake, Manitoba, Canada. I have a life-long love of wildlife & natural places. After working for radio and TV stations for about 30 years, I've turned to science writing as a freelancer specializing in the Earth Sciences. I’m a member of the Science Writers & Communicators of Canada and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I’m authorized to receive embargoed material through the Science Media Centre of Canada, the Royal Society, NatureResearch and the World Health Organization. This allows me advance access to important, peer-reviewed research often warning of habitat loss and the threat of extinction facing many wild species, usually thanks to human intrusion and intervention by the hand of man. They then often become "hot-off-the-press" stories which are ready to publish the moment the embargoes are lifted. I publish www.PlanetInPeril.ca (PinP) "Where Science Gets Respect." I own professional photographic gear and am sometimes able to enhance my stories with my own images.
New research shows, two closely-related species of wild cats in Ontario, Canada, may face starkly different futures. Is this “survival of the fittest?”
To the untrained eye, the two species might pass as overgrown house cats. They’re actually “felids” or mammals belonging to felidae, a family of wild cats. Both live side by side in the wilds of Ontario, north of Lake Huron. Researchers at the University of Trent in Peterborough, Ontario, looked at bobcat and lynx numbers, […]
According to a new study – there’s simply no proof that wolf culls – aimed at saving western Canada’s endangered mountain caribou – are working.
New research by a team of biologists, seems to support critics who have long argued that wolves are being sacrificed unnecessarily in efforts to save mountain caribou in British Columbia and Alberta from the growing threat of extinction. Since the 80s, authorities in the two provinces (Canada’s westernmost) have been conducting “culls” which have probably […]
New research suggests, zoos and aquariums in Canada do little to protect endangered creatures in the wild.
A study published in the Canadian journal, Facets recently, begins positively enough. It acknowledges that the thirty Canadian zoos and aquariums represented by CAZA, a private, non-profit charity, do try to be leaders in researching this field. And, they do take part in programs aimed at species survival by breeding animals in captivity, then re-introducing […]
Rapidly warming oceans have left many northern marine mammals swimming in troubled waters. But perhaps none more so than than the strange and mysterious “unicorn of the sea,” the narwhal.
An exhaustive new study estimates, habitat suitable to narwhals could shrink by a staggering twenty-five percent by century’s end. Thanks to manmade climate change, their watery home is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth. And, in a scant few decades, sea-ice, so vital to their survival, could be gone altogether during Arctic summers. Narwhals […]
The plight of the “Short-Ear.” A wild dog in trouble
Whether famous or obscure, Earth’s wild creatures cannot hide from the hand of man. Scant months ago, more than a billion animals, including iconic kangaroos and cuddly koalas, perished in Australia‘s calamitous bushfires, found by scientists to have been worsened by man-made climate change. Now, researchers say, one of Amazonia’s least-known species could be all […]